Thinking Out Loud: Bitcoin, the Metaverse, NFTs, and Crypto

BTC - METAVERSE

[00:00:00] James Rippeon: Today we're gonna be talking about Bitcoin crypto NFTs. Metaverse what the heck does all that mean? And how are we looking at it from our perspective as an investment thesis? 

[00:00:11] intro: You're listening to the real fi podcast where we discuss time, tested tricks, techniques, and strategies for pursuing financial independence today, so that we can enjoy a better tomorrow financial independence. Isn't about getting rich quick. It's about cultivating a foundation to grow financially mental. Physically and spiritually let's figure out how to kick the nine to five. Here are your hosts, Patrick and James.

[00:00:44] James Rippeon: How's it going everybody. And welcome back to another installment of the real FFI podcast. This is a thinking out loud segment. I'm here with my co-host Patrick McGrath. How's it going, Patrick? 

[00:00:55] Patrick McGrath: James, it's going great. Happy Monday. 

[00:00:59] James Rippeon: Happy Monday to [00:01:00] you as well, sir. So I think we got a really interesting topic to cover today.

[00:01:04] It's timely on, on many fronts. I think over the past couple years, it would've been timely in different respects. Today we're gonna be talking about Bitcoin crypto NFTs. Metaverse what the heck does all that mean? And how are we looking at it from our perspective as an investment thesis?

[00:01:21] Of course. None of the things Patrick or I say is gonna be investment advice. In fact, a lot of you probably be better off doing the exact opposite of what we're doing and what we're talking about. Nonetheless, I think it's an interesting thing to talk about and discuss because personally, Bitcoin has become a very large and substantial part of my portfolio and my means of trying to reach financial independence.

[00:01:42] It's definitely worth discussing. But yeah, with that, like I'm looking at this Bitcoin price right now, it's at $33,910. Taking an absolute beating over the head at its high was at $69,000. We've come a long way. Personally and I'm sure, maybe [00:02:00] Patrick can speak to this as well as it relates to his personal finances, we're, I'm not an index fund investor.

[00:02:06] I'm more so on the risk in management and control of my asset side. So you know, my two things that I buy are Bitcoin. In real estate. Both of those things, I think have a lot of upside potential in this economy. Those are the things that I've been interested in and then generally just crypto metaverse and everything that comes along with this changing economy.

[00:02:26] But yeah, that's what we're gonna be talking about today. There's a lot to dig into Patrick. 

[00:02:31] Patrick McGrath: Yeah, there sure is. Especially this week in particular with we have about a 16 to 18% drop in overall price on Bitcoin, which correlates to probably a 30 To 40% drop on a lot of the alt coins out there.

[00:02:49] I know my portfolio has taken a beating over the last month, let alone the last five days. So I'm sure there's a lot of other people out there that are feeling the pain, [00:03:00] but just remember that The key to all investing is only invest, which you're willing to lose, especially when it comes to high risk assets, like cryptocurrency NFTs, all of that stuff.

[00:03:11] I had. Put myself in a particularly hard situation back in 2017, 2018, where I overextended myself significantly. And I had to ride that bear market for about three years. This is familiar territory where we're at right now for me. But hopefully, what we talk about today can help.

[00:03:31] Other people out there that maybe just got started in crypto and NFT, explain the space a little bit and get an understanding and an idea of both of our thoughts. Again, none of this is financial advice. I've made some money, I've lost a lot of money but still believe in the space. Let's let's get started and see if we can bring some insight to the people out there, James.

[00:03:51] Yeah, man, 

[00:03:51] James Rippeon: for sure. Where do you wanna start? There's just so much to talk about in this space from just Bitcoin to everything else other than Bitcoin, and you [00:04:00] got crypto and metaverse and NFTs where do you wanna start? There's a lot to dig into for sure. 

[00:04:05] Patrick McGrath: Yeah. I think we should start in the metaverse.

[00:04:08] So for anyone out there that doesn't really understand or know what the metaverse is like the ready player, one version of alternative reality. Basically you, I. We'll have a virtual avatar that you can go and explore multiple different worlds inside those multiple different worlds.

[00:04:28] There is concerts there's malls, there's people that have houses and apartments and different clubs and art galleries and all of this kind of stuff that people are building digitally inside this world. And with that Comes a lot of opportunity for wearables. Your clothing on your avatar, your helmets, the artwork that goes along with it, that this kind of plays into the NFTs and all of that.

[00:04:54] But there's a lot of digital, real estate that's being sold right now. I can remember just [00:05:00] two months ago you could buy a plot of land. Inside decentral land for between 20 $503,000. If you go on open sea right now you can't find, a square of land for less than 15 to $20,000. That's a five X in just two months, so things are picking up huge.

[00:05:18] And it's a really interesting space. Hence why Facebook changed their name to meta? They're going in full speed ahead. They believe that in the next two to three years, most of us will be having digital offices where, you'll be sitting at home with your VR headset and you'll be interacting inside a virtual office space.

[00:05:39] As we know with most things, those timelines tend to be extended a bit. But it's a really, it's really exciting. And I'd love to hear your perspective on the metaverse James. I 

[00:05:49] James Rippeon: have almost no knowledge about what all of this is the, the metaverse is this. Just [00:06:00] concept that I have a hard time wrapping my head around because it's almost one of those things that you can't really tangibly touch.

[00:06:05] So you have no real perspective of, how to describe it. But I think that what kind of hit the nail on the head for me with wanting to have an appreciation for what's changing is the fact that, like you said, Facebook. It's changing their name and their company brand and vision to incorporate this whole metaverse concept into it.

[00:06:26] How long has that been, occurring in behind the scenes for that company? I don't know, maybe a long time, but you're starting to see this with other businesses as well. Concert venues going into the metaverse branding efforts by companies like Nike and other. Quality brands going into the NFT space and finding ways to market themselves in this area.

[00:06:49] It's something that you just can't simply ignore, but, with it being so new, there's gonna be a lot of speculation, rampant, speculation. And it's gonna be a difficult thing for people to determine what the true [00:07:00] value of these assets are. I think just like we had the.com bubble, everything blew up in valuations prices went to the moon, but you have this equilibrium.

[00:07:10] Was a painful process to reach. And then after, all these crazy projects in 2000, 2001, went belly up, you were left with, the cream, like the Googles, the Amazons apple, all these other great quality tech companies that turned out to be very, profitable. Purchases even after the head dropped like 95% after the.com bubble.

[00:07:31] I think if you're getting into this space, generally, I think that's, just something to have an appreciation of. But as far as a metaphor specifically, I think there's so much opportunity here, especially what interests me is the real estate opportunity, buying scarce, digital location assets in this metaverse and being.

[00:07:50] Monetize them in some way capacity, whether you're hanging up NFTs in there making an art gallery. I know you and I have talked about that quite a bit, or, renting out some sort of venue. [00:08:00] An artist is using for maybe doing standup comedy or maybe just a concert with a music artist.

[00:08:06] I think the there's a lot of potential there. One of my curiosities is how do you build out the space to make it suitable for something like that? And how does the technical aspect work? How creative do you need to be to get that going? And I think at the same time, just like regular, real estate, you don't need to know everything cause you can outsource a lot of these components and maybe partner with people and figure out ways to make it grow.

[00:08:27] What are your thoughts on 

[00:08:28] Patrick McGrath: that, Patrick? No. That's a hundred percent. If you look at some metaverse articles for decentral land, you'll see that a conglomerate of people out there spent over 1.5 million on a few acres of property inside the metaverse to build a digital mall where they're going to be renting out and leasing space to companies to sell digital.

[00:08:55] Like I was saying, wearables. and different things [00:09:00] inside of the metaverse you're gonna be able to walk around the mall, spend your manana, which is the decentralized or decentral land coin to buy products, digital products inside the digital world with, for your digital avatar. So it's extremely interesting.

[00:09:16] I've went along the same thing where, okay. Once I buy this plot of land, how do I build one here? You can hire out that thing, like you're saying partner up on that. It is highly speculative right now. So many different investments are spec are speculative and you have that risk to reward ratio.

[00:09:33] And I think right now your risk is medium to high, but your reward could be exponential. So that's something you really have to think about. I know myself I've, got into talking with a partner of mine. Who's a digital artist and an artist, and we talked about creating NFT wearable t-shirts and different things like that to try to sell inside because you can create the beautiful thing about this virtual [00:10:00] space is that you can create one thing and sell it over and over again, you could do one of one t-shirts and wearables, or you could say, Hey, this is one of a thousand.

[00:10:09] And then only a thousand people have that one thing, which only create it once. And people are paying right now, hundreds of dollars for. Digital t-shirts and digital wearable watches and all kinds of different stuff. It can be extremely lucrative. And again it's such a new space that typically the first to adopt and the first to get out there, usually grab the most market share and it's harder and harder to take that away.

[00:10:37] So I think I think the opportunity is huge. And it's definitely something that I'm looking into, but the whole metaverse thing really ties into NFTs. And I know NFTs have exploded over the last year for people that don't understand what they are, they're called non fungible tokens, which means that on the blockchain, they have a [00:11:00] basically think of it as your.

[00:11:03] Social security number, for you as a person that piece of artwork, that wearable, that piece of land, it has a digital code on the blockchain, which lets you know, that you are the sole owner of that and have the rights to it in the digital world. So when people are selling these artwork pieces and everything.

[00:11:23] They're the owner of that. And what's really interesting is that Twitter just put out on Twitter that you can now show your NFTs as your Twitter on your Twitter, Twitter handle as your picture. And it will verify it on the blockchain, which is so cool. So now people are getting to display these different things.

[00:11:44] You've seen some rappers out there who have, little gold chains with their NFTs that go across. They're necklace and everything. So everybody is getting really big into this. And it really reminds me of the [00:12:00] 2017, 2018 crypto explosion, but it's in the NFT world and you can do this with everything.

[00:12:06] Gary V BA is basically saying that everything is gonna be NFTs. Your concert tickets are gonna be NFT. So you, so they're not scalped. You are, you're gonna be able. Purchase and buy real estate and get rid of title companies and everything else be you're gonna get rid of the middleman because it can come from me to you and it can be verified on the blockchain.

[00:12:25] So it, it's not just these little pixelated pictures and digital art. It's this. Whole other realm that you couldn't even imagine. I Artists are selling direct to consumer their songs and albums in NFTs, and you can have royalties and all of this other stuff it's just mind blowing. And I think everyone should definitely spend a little bit of time to research this stuff and just know what's coming in the next, two to five years.

[00:12:56] It's extremely important. So how do you feel about that, James? [00:13:00] 

[00:13:01] James Rippeon: I thought that NFTs were the dumbest freaking thing ever. When I first learned about these things and, they're just digital JPEGs that everybody, every, anyone can right. Click download, save, and have their own, asset that way they can replicate it in a sense.

[00:13:18] I think my concern with it in the beginning was there's no scarcity to. To the asset, looking back now, I think that was just more of an ignorant, thing for me to think. Cause I don't didn't really understand how this all works. I think the really cool thing about NFT is that gave me that value proposition.

[00:13:37] Is the fact that businesses are gonna be able to start using these NFTs as a branding mechanism for branding their products and services. And I think you're gonna start seeing this into the future, especially for those lines of NFTs that stick around and become popular and hold their value. What, how do you value the IP of apple?

[00:13:56] Or Google and those, digital images of their [00:14:00] logos. And, it's worth a lot of money. I think you're gonna start seeing people for example, these board apes, I know one person bought one of these apes and they're gonna use it to start branding a surf shop and custom branded coffee.

[00:14:13] And that board ape is gonna be the intellectual property driving that brand. I think that's huge. And when. Learn that aspect of how to use an NFT to not have value just in the sake that it's a speculation and you're gonna own this asset, but as a means of promoting. Actual value in the real world of selling coffee and, having a surf shop.

[00:14:36] I think that's where the lot of the value in the future's gonna come. You're gonna, I think start seeing people pulling capital together, buying these assets, leasing them out on a royalty basis and allowing people to. Market using these NFTs. There's gonna be so much opportunity here with that kind of business model.

[00:14:55] Patrick McGrath: Yeah, no, that's so true. What's also very interesting. Is. [00:15:00] Some of these NFTs can be utilized as tickets or grant you access into certain parts of the metaverse. So you can only get certain places if you Are a holder of an NFT you're only allowed access into certain clubs or certain parts of the metaverse and that 

[00:15:21] James Rippeon: I Gary V is doing something like that too.

[00:15:23] He's got these NFTs that permit you to have certain levels of access with him based on the level that you buy. 

[00:15:31] Patrick McGrath: So that's one of the. Yeah. So you're you're kind imagine it as a modern day yacht club or golf what do you call it? Golf club. Golf, golf. Yeah. So yeah a lot of people think that, those are dumb, but that grant you access just like James said, this gets you in the room with people who can afford these things who are doing these types of things.

[00:15:51] So you can think it as a As like a mindset club or a mentorship club and having access to one of these [00:16:00] NFTs again, maybe get you Gary V's phone number, maybe get you an hour on the phone with him to look at your business. Maybe he gives you a contact for some, for someone. So you've gotta look at this space in just a completely different realm.

[00:16:14] And I can anyone out there that's this is dumb. Just like James said, just like I thought I'm like, I think it's. When you first are talking about this concept, it sounds absolutely ridiculous. And I'll be the first one to admit it. I still agree that sometimes it is absolutely ridiculous, but the fact of the matter is it's happening, it's here and all this stuff is taking place, whether or not you agree with it.

[00:16:39] And it's the same thing that happened with cryptocurrency, which we're about to get into five years. Six years ago, three years ago, everyone said cryptocurrency was dead. And then this, you know, 20, 21, it absolutely blew up. So these things are taking place, whether or not you're on board. So [00:17:00] at least do yourself a favor and try to understand, and like what James said right there.

[00:17:07] Here's a thought that I've had. So there's syndications for real. You could do an NFT syndication. So you could, I could essentially get a property under contract and I could sell NFTs based on a percentage of the property, say a I could get a hundred people to invest $2,500 or one Ethereum, 3000, whatever it is at the time.

[00:17:34] And I could raise, $300,000 and use that to buy use it to buy an apartment building, and then we could share in the cash flow for you holding that NFT, that gets you a piece of the overall deal. So this it creates this whole thing. So you really have to think of. About it outside of the box and be creative because that's the great thing about this digital space is you can be as creative as [00:18:00] possible, just like with real estate, with creative financing, creative ways to put deals together.

[00:18:05] You need to think about this space as a way to help you in your real life business, accomplish your goals and see the world a little differently. So that's extremely exciting. Yeah, I 

[00:18:16] James Rippeon: think 100%, I think I want to nail down a little bit more on what you were saying about not dismissing it and taking the time to learn about it.

[00:18:23] Everybody out there who's listening right now. Go Google. Katie Kerick and I don't know if I'm saying the last name, right? Kerick C O U R I C. And her interview that she did on the internet back in 19. 90 something. She was basically had no idea what the internet was. No idea what email was critical of the concept of it coming around as a new technology and look where we are today, only 22 years later.

[00:18:46] Imagine being that person who criticized. Email on the internet and thinking it would amount to nothing. It took somebody who was willing to have a contrarian opinion and dig into it and see the value and then start [00:19:00] building businesses on that internet protocol and, look where they are today.

[00:19:05] So go look up that interview. It's comical to look back from a historical perspective. But yeah, there's gonna be so much opportunity here for sure. And I guess that leads us into, We talked about the, metaverse talked about NFTs. Now we got crypto, what is, all this kind of sounds related, interchangeable.

[00:19:20] What are your opinions on the differences between like NFTs and crypto Patrick? 

[00:19:26] Patrick McGrath: Yeah. So right now you have to use cryptocurrency to purchase NFTs. So it is relatable, but it's. Interchangeable in a way. So all these different cryptocurrencies are different projects in different companies.

[00:19:45] So when you're thinking about investing in a cryptocurrency, think about investing in a company like an apple or a Google or something else like that, they all have a mission behind their project and you are. [00:20:00] By purchasing and holding that cryptocurrency, you are investing in that project's success basically, and showing that you believe in it.

[00:20:09] Now there's a. Zillion cryptocurrencies out there. There's a ton of scams. There's a ton of rug pools, what they call, where people will, sell these cryptocurrencies. And then they'll just roll out with your money. There's all kinds of that. And you hear about it all the time on the internet, but.

[00:20:26] If you're investing in, the top 100 on coin market cap or the top 200 coins on corn market cap that have been around for a few years they actually are helping out and they're designed to help out the digital world. You have Bitcoin, which is good. They say is a, digital store of value, like gold.

[00:20:46] You have Ethereum, which is basically. Application platform that allows you to build on it for web two. And then you have layer three, which is the new web. And [00:21:00] there's all of these different types of things that you can. Invest in and learn about there's, XRP or ripple, which is basically breaking out the middle man of the banking system and allowing you to trade and send hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars within seconds and verifying it and not having to take two or three days like it typically does for the banking system.

[00:21:21] So there's a lot of these things that are cutting out the middleman and the middleman. The banking system in the federal reserve, which is why you're hearing about that in the news a lot about these different companies, banning cryptocurrency, because it has the ability to destabilize countries and.

[00:21:40] Like we talked about before is, help bank, the unbanked think of Venezuela. And some of these other companies that are adopting Bitcoin as their main transaction currency which is mind blowing to think that 13 years ago, Bitcoin was created. And here we are today with multiple countries deciding to use it as their [00:22:00] store of value.

[00:22:01] Because it transacts better than their own currency it's, deflationary and all this other stuff. So it's a long winded thing about cryptocurrency, but you gotta touch bases on a lot of different things because cryptocurrency means. So many things. And I want to pin down that point to a lot of people, is it means different cryptocurrencies and different projects are trying to do so many different things.

[00:22:23] So it's money it's investing in projects. It's investing in the internet. It's all this different stuff. James, am I making any sense here? 

[00:22:32] James Rippeon: absolutely, man. It's. It's one of those things like we keep harping on. There's a lot to dig into and you're not gonna have knowledge base to really understand it by just listening to this one episode and knowing where to go from there.

[00:22:44] Personally, I'll talk about my journey in the space. I only buy Bitcoin doesn't mean that I don't think like these other projects don't have value. I just don't understand them as much. And I think that the value proposition. I appreciate with Bitcoin is exactly [00:23:00] what Patrick was talking about with these countries.

[00:23:02] They're adopting Bitcoin as legal tender for a multitude of reasons. The primary one, I think is the fact that a lot of these countries are on the dollar standard. They actually have dollars as like their native country currency. And what you get is, we got the fed print.

[00:23:18] Literally trillions of dollars per year. And who knows how much we're gonna be printing into the future. When you think about a dollar based economy, the benefit of that printing is going into the United States, but what does that mean for these other countries that have. A dollar standard. They're not getting the welfare checks, they're not getting the benefit from all that printing.

[00:23:37] What they're getting is a currency that is the basing becoming less valuable to them. And it's messing a lot of things up. We could just see the price of real estate used cars, lumber, everything's going to the moon and everything's becoming super volatile. And I think these countries are picking up on that.

[00:23:54] They don't have control of their currency, and this is a decentralized. Store value that people can [00:24:00] maybe eventually use to transact with as a medium of exchange. I think it presents a lot of opportunities for countries, companies, people getting the unbanked, banked, giving them economic prosperity and opportunity at that.

[00:24:12] I'm super interested in, following, some of the top cryptocurrencies as they relate and compare it to Bitcoin because it, it seems like it's this competition in this race. But I think that, Ethereum is definitely solving a different problem than Bitcoin. I think once you have that appreciation for like the differences you'll know how to invest from there.

[00:24:30] Patrick was saying dium is a means for developing smart contracts and applications. And it has this, wide array of uses and Bitcoin is more so of a store value currency. And so they're just really two D. Things, and it's really difficult to try to compare them as if they're fighting over the same space.

[00:24:50] I think more. Yeah. And I, when I think about, cryptocurrencies, let's break it down like this, you got two different methods of structuring crypto. You got proof of work which is [00:25:00] Bitcoin also currently Ethereum. And then. Proof of stake, which Ethereum is trying to transition into.

[00:25:05] And one of these is centralized. One of them is decentralized, but there's benefits and trade offs to all of that. The proof of stake, centralized kind of situation allows you to have more flexibility and more cheap and affordable ways to scale and grow. Whereas the, the decentralized proof of work side of Bitcoin makes it super secure makes the asset very scarce not controlled by, too many individuals.

[00:25:29] So I think the space is super, super expansive. There's a lot to dig into. And once you know what you're looking at, it's gonna give you a good framework to invest from there. And I was thinking about this earlier, when we were chatting, when you're looking at a new space and thinking about how you want to get into and invest, you had the gold rush out to the, the west coast of the United States and people were speculating, either in buying land or going out there to mine or pan for gold themselves in the river.

[00:25:55] And looking back, I think. It's pretty apparent that the winners [00:26:00] in that whole situation where the people selling the pickaxes and the shovels and the gold pans because, no matter what the price of the gold was, or the land that people thought there was gold in people were buying those.

[00:26:11] Assets to start doing the work and digging. So if you can find something like that in the space there's gonna be businesses popping up left and right that are, taking fees off of transactions and generating revenue in a very predictable, stable manner. Whether it's the, big Bitcoin mining companies that are public or maybe Coinbase or, whatever different way to look at the space to maybe.

[00:26:33] Think about making money rather than just buying these speculative assets themselves. 

[00:26:38] Patrick McGrath: Exactly. There's so many different ways to invest in the space. And James just said you really have to do your own research. And also look at people's motives. Like our motive is to just bring this to your attention.

[00:26:52] And so you're aware of these different things that are going on and different opportunities. That are out there, but there's [00:27:00] a ton of people on YouTube and Twitter that, are selling access to their discord pages and, giving selling access to their trades and all of this different stuff.

[00:27:08] There's people making money on all these different lab levels, whether Bitcoin's going up, whether it's going down their YouTube channels, their clicks. You really have to understand the motive behind the information that you're getting, where you're getting it from and just make sure that you're, trying to make the best decision for yourself, your risk tolerance your risk reward tolerance, and again, not investing for the long term.

[00:27:33] I think that's probably the biggest thing. Just to give you a little breakdown. I, again, I invested back in 2017, 2018 bull run and the market went down. We had a 90% correction. Bitcoin went from 20,000 to 3000 and I bought three Bitcoin around. I had three and a half Bitcoin.

[00:27:51] I was mining. I had a mining company. So James was talking about proof of work. I had, I was mining Ethereum at the time, helping with the proof of work [00:28:00] and. The market crashed and we thought it was gonna be six months or a year. And it turned out to be three years. And I held onto a lot of that crypto until LA until 2020.

[00:28:12] So December of 2020, I sold off a lot of it. I sold a lot of that crypto for about $8,000. If I would've held onto that for about another six months, that'd been worth over a hundred thousand dollars. And that just goes to show you that if you hold out for the long term, even with where we're at today, this is Monday the 24th and everything is down 50% from its all time high.

[00:28:39] It would still be profitable still to this day. So when you're thinking about this. Think about investing in long term place that you're willing to hold for three to five years. Just like with the stock market, just like with anything else, it's an spec, it's a speculative asset, but if you're buying [00:29:00] quality projects, you're doing your own research over time.

[00:29:04] You can hope and expect that the appreciation of the space, the growth of the space will. Will be positive on your portfolio and hopefully, help you towards your goal of financial independence. And I think that's all we're trying to do here is is help you towards that goal of financial independence and give you another tool in the toolbox to get you there.

[00:29:28] James Rippeon: So on the whole long term aspect 100% people, being in the game for the long term, I think is where you find a lot of people. Who've created wealth in real estate and in the stock market and the companies that they started, they found something, they focused, they stayed with it and they were consistent over long periods of time.

[00:29:46] Just plain and simple, that's how you're gonna find people creating wealth. I'm on my path to doing that. That's my biggest. Kryptonite is, shiny object syndrome bouncing around from one stock to the next, or from one opportunity to the next [00:30:00] buying and selling. I can tell you hands down, the biggest mistakes I've ever made in investing.

[00:30:03] Either some investing in something that I wasn't knowledgeable about or be selling and that's literally been the biggest mistakes I've ever made real estate, everything else. So I just wanna let you guys know what my strategy is with Bitcoin and why only Bitcoin. And this might be a surprising thing to hear, but I literally never plan on selling my.

[00:30:24] Ever, and you might be thinking like, okay, what's the benefit of that? You know what use is having the Bitcoin, if you can't buy things with it you can collateralize your Bitcoin. Probably other crypto assets too, take loans against them and buy cash flowing assets that give you an arbitrage opportunity on the loan that you're taking against your collateral and the cash flow that's being generated.

[00:30:46] So my plan just keeps stacking Bitcoin never gonna sell it. What does that mean? I'm never gonna pay taxes on it. First of all. That's awesome. One of the biggest expenses anybody has is paying uncle Sam, and then it's your, [00:31:00] real estate that you're living in. So I'll never pay taxes on it, and then I'll be able to take loans against it.

[00:31:04] Buy real estate. That's my plan. Have the cash flow, pay off the loans and just recycle and repeat couple drawback. Obviously the volatility in Bitcoin can really screw you over. So like you can have, what's called a margin call when you're collateralized loan. If the collateral, the value of the collateral drops too much, you might be required to post more collateral or you'll get totally liquidated and wrecked.

[00:31:27] These loan products are finally coming out where you're gonna, I think recently there's two companies Mylo and lead. They're talking about Bitcoin back mortgages, literally get like a two to 30 year mortgage by just posting collateral Bitcoin. And then, not have to go through the headache of working with a traditional lender.

[00:31:45] So these products are coming out. I think I think, that, that's the thing that I'm most excited about is that opportunity right there, it's requiring a lot of patience. Cause I don't think that Bitcoin's at a place where it's necessarily super good to be used as collateral because of how [00:32:00] volatile it is.

[00:32:00] Like it went from 69 to 33, like nobody expected that yet it happened. There's a lot of cool stuff on the horizon there's, I'm not reinventing the wheel here. This is a technique it's called infinite banking. Go look it up, research it, use your assets to buy more assets and then, get cheap debt and buy more assets.

[00:32:18] It's, that's all it is. 

[00:32:20] Patrick McGrath: Exactly. And you see it ties into real estate. It ties into investing. It ties into financial independence, ties into freedom and. Yeah, that's huge. And and we can talk, we could keep going and going on this because there's so many different, interesting things.

[00:32:36] You could literally put like 50 grand or however much you want in your coin base account and keep it in us DC and get a six to 9% return on your money, which you're only getting. 0.0, two, 5% sitting in a savings account in your bank. What is that 40 X or something? Yeah, a return on your money just by keeping it in your coin base account.

[00:32:59] And then we didn't [00:33:00] even get into Dows and all these other things. There's so many interesting things that cuz you could be on the other side of the lending, you could. You could put your cryptocurrency up to lenders, which they will lend out in short term loans, and then you could get, there's some 20, 30, 50, 90% AP wise out there for different things.

[00:33:22] It's so interesting. Again, I think we'll have to touch base on this in a couple weeks or a month. Maybe we'll do a monthly crypto blockchain kind of thinking out loud as the space is evolving and changing. If anyone out there would like to see that or hear our perspective on that once a month, since we do these once a week, go ahead, leave us a comment on whatever this video is.

[00:33:47] Shoot us a DM. All of that. If you'd like this to touch base on anything crypto related. Go ahead, send us a message and we'll do our best to touch base on that. We are by no means experts on any of this. [00:34:00] We're just two regular guys given our perspectives on things that we find interesting, and that we invest in ourselves.

[00:34:07] We're just 

[00:34:08] James Rippeon: too humble guys, trying to learn educate ourselves. And in the process you. Maybe share some of those experiences and knowledge bonds with you guys. Wealth is, it's a ultimate act of self-accountability and critical thinking. Don't do stupid stuff and, take your wealth in your own hands and we'll get there together for sure.

[00:34:27] Patrick McGrath: Yes, sir. I think it's time to wrap this one up, James. We will see you guys. Next week on the real fi podcast, thinking out loud. 

[00:34:39] James Rippeon: See you. 

[00:34:42] outro: Thank you for listening to the real fi podcast where you learn from the investors that have lived, the hard lessons for you to connect with us during your pursuit of financial independence.

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